Content area
Full Text
THE CITADEL OF CAIRO: A NEW INTERPRETATION OF ROYAL MAMLUK ARCHITECTURE. By NASSER 0. RABBAT. Leiden, New York and K61n, E.J. Brill, 1995. 339 pp., 32 Plates, 48 figs. The architectural history of citadels in the Middle East during the Islamic period continues to be a complicated subject of study which discourages further research. Citadels have been occupied since the Middle Ages successively by different states, dynasties (Muslim and non-Muslim) or different households within the same dynasty, each leaving behind distinctive signs of possession varying from royal inscriptions to ceramic sherds or to constructions. There has been over time a constant deconstruction and reconstruction of buildings within a citadel, making its architectural history difficult to follow and hampering the reconstruction of each successive period in its own right.
One of the main handicaps in many cases is the impossibility of making a thorough archaeological survey of the site, owing generally to contemporary urban conditions. In The Citadel of Cairo Nasser Rabbat has focused on the interpretation of contemporary historical texts in order to write the architectural history of the citadel from its foundation by Salah al-Din until it reached its most monumental form in the middle of the fourteenth century. He matches with admirable precision the relevant information in the Arabic texts to existing buildings or parts of buildings; the results of a limited number of archaeological surveys carried out by the Egyptian Antiquities Department; descriptions, engravings and maps of the nineteenth century and his own interpretations of the site, as well as important measured drawings he has produced as an architect. Lack of relevant inscription panels (except the dedicatory inscription of Salah al-Din above the Bab al-Mudarraj) from which one can identify the patron, the date and the function of buildings or different types of construction work carried out in the citadel underline the importance of the above-mentioned sources and the comparative methodology adopted in this book.
Rabbat first provides an outline of the physical structure of the citadel within the wider context of Cairo, and in turn sets Cairo historically against the background of significant change initiated by the arrival of the Turks in the eleventh century. Citadels were then constructed not only for security and defense but also as princely residences. In...